In Europe, digitization in education is the subject of controversial debate (Swertz 2019). The framework is split between the economically motivated DigComp concept (Vuorikari & Punie 2016) and the human rights oriented concept of critical media literacy (Grizzle, Wilson, & Gordon 2021). This tension also affects teaching with digital media, since teaching methods frame the content.

While concepts of technology enhanced learning (Sen & Leong 2019) can be mostly motivated by arguments that can be classified as economic, this is not the case with some concepts of educational technology  (Meder 2006), open educational practices (Ehlers, 2011) and open pedagogy (Hegarty, 2015), which can mostly be classified as human rights oriented. In these cases, critical media competence (Buckingham 2015; Kellner & Share 2019) and educational technology are thought of together (Bronwyn & Selwyn 2021).

This problem has been exacerbated by the greater prevalence of digital media education in many European countries over the past two years. To discuss this problem, the panel will start from the Declaration of Human Rights and the values associated with it. These are the values of freedom, justice and peace and the rights derived from them in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (freedom of opinion, expression, use of the media).

Against this background, it is reasonable to assume that concepts from the portfolio of open educational practices are suitable means to communicate and practice these values. We will discuss this by using university pedagogical practice as an example. The aim is to identify arguments and methods for adopting open educational practices in universities.

Against this aim, the question arises on how scholars can actively practice open and digital education to contribute to the values described above. By now, literature on open educational practices describes its practical implementation rather vaguely (Bellinger & Mayrberger, 2019). The use of open educational resources (UNESCO, k.A.) is prevalent, whereas the forms of open pedagogical elements stay unclear.   

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to push digital education in higher education more radically than any other events in the past years. However, the principles of open scholarship and open educational practices in digital media education, alongside their aim to communicate human rights, seemed to take a back seat. This panel would like to bring up this debate back and discuss the potential of technology-enhanced learning  to change education and foster open and digital scholarship (Crick, 2021, Weller, 2014). We will also  discuss what digital practices can be recommended to an open-minded scientist in times of pandemic.

We will structure our panel around three core questions. After shortly introducing them, we invite all participants to actively contribute their thoughts, ideas and current research, and to help us record what we have learnt so far and should not forget in post-pandemic teaching.  

Our core questions are:

• What are the values of critical media didactic concepts? 

• How can open educational practices and pedagogies be embedded in  learning and teaching environments?  

• What does academic scholarship mean in practice?

Panel presenters

• Carina Bossu: More than technical skills: Academic competencies for digital and open scholarship

• Christian Swertz: Considering the Value of Beauty in Creative Teaching Designs. Creations for Free Scholars

• Tamara Heck: Thinking open research and open education together: Potentials of a digitized educational environment 

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